


The Weight of Stardust

by elle_nic



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, Cheating, F/F, Heartbreak, Heavy Angst, Love, Love Confessions, My First Work in This Fandom, Sad, fiction&femslashevent, pls im so sorry, this is so sad yo oh my god
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-18
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-21 01:42:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20685422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_nic/pseuds/elle_nic
Summary: Kara is fast, but she's not quite fast enough.





	The Weight of Stardust

**Author's Note:**

> im new here so pls be nice and let me know how you feel about it if you want!! pls enjoy :)))
> 
> not beta'd but what else is new

Kara was faster than sound, sometimes light (at least to humans), faster than the flap of a hummingbird’s wings. Kara was so fast she could sidestep bullets, she could dodge actual laser beams, she could catch meteors. Kara was stronger. She was stronger than chromium, than titanium even. She was stronger than Kal, the strongest man on earth. Kara was bulletproof, and faster than fast, and she was smart, too. Kara was fast, but this time, she was not fast enough.

She had fallen in love with Cat sometime between flinging her off a building and seeing the back of her blonde head as she left CatCo. She had fallen in love with her from across the sea and over a few text messages every few months. She had fallen in love with email, always short and brusque, but with words like “Good, keep it up”. She had fallen in love with her boss, then a stranger, then her friend, and like in all things, love especially, Kara was so very fast.

It was difficult at first, naturally. She was torn between telling Cat and never telling Cat. Between the constant angst of “what if” and “it’ll never work”, and Kara was stronger than strong, but this was crippling her. Alex could see, Eliza could hear it when she called her youngest, and even from across the globe, in a yacht, a yurt, Yemen, Cat too could sense that something was not quite right with the sunshine of National City.

Kara tried to hide it, to play it off as a bad week, a bad pot sticker she ate (there was no such thing), but Cat told her “bullshit, Kara,” every time. But Kara was still torn. The Woman of Steel, Champion of National City, was afraid of love. She argued she had every right… Cat was unpredictable, Kara knew, but showing up at her apartment late on a Thursday evening, was a new height even for her.

“Open the door, Kara.” She did. “Sit down,” Cat said. She did. “And _listen_.” And Kara did. Cat told her about her yachts and yurts and about Yemen and all the places and people and things she had been to and seen and tasted. She told Kara about a village where two women raised all the orphans from the neighbouring villages together as wives. How they had invited her for tea and she had been too polite to say it was too bitter for her. She told Kara she drank every last drop of that tea, and how she had figured something out.

“It was like the tea was so bitter that it rewired my brain,” she said, as Kara listened raptly. “It was like, I was in this tiny village in Mongolia and in front of these two wives with their dozens of children and I just… I just got it.”

“What did you get,” Kara whispered, her little heart beating.

“Love,” Cat replied. “Love is so different and fickle and it’s- it’s… Well, it’s here, isn’t it?”

“Here?”

“With us.”

“Yes,” Kara said quickly. “Yes, Cat.”

“Good,” she said, then kissed Kara on her couch in her apartment as her heart nearly beat out of her chest. Love was here, she knew then. But as she knew now, it was not going to stay.

They had been in Love (with a capital L because Kara loved loved _loved_ Cat) for nearly two years when suddenly they weren’t. Cat had been staying at work and drinking more bourbon and had changed her perfume. She was beautiful, and Kara was supportive of her buying back CatCo, of retaking her life in National City. She loved Carter, who loved her in return, especially when she played video games poorly to let him win every now and then. Kara was loved, and happy and fast. She was so, so fast, but this time she was not ready. She was not ready.

Kara had been asking about the perfume Cat had been wearing. It smelled really nice, but it was different to the one Cat used to wear every day. It was sweeter, more floral, and though she thought it didn’t suit Cat quite as well as the other one, it was still very nice. Cat had not known the name of the perfume, busy reading though paperwork in her home office. Kara didn’t think about it again until later. She wasn’t that fast.

Lucy had been wanting to purchase a new perfume some weeks later. She was getting fed up with smelling like sandalwood and vanilla, wanted something sweet and fruity to juxtapose her personality (her words). Kara described Cat’s to her, and Lucy begged her to find the name, so she knew somewhere to start. Kara, of course, said yes. Said she’d investigate and get back to her. She went home, home to hers and Cat’s and Carter’s apartment. Home to perfume. Perfume that didn’t suit Cat.

Cat was meticulous, which hardly surprised anyone, but she was particularly finicky about organising her clothes and accessories. Kara was grateful for that when she got home, Cat was working late again, and Carter had made a few friends from a science fair the year before, so no one was home. She would be grateful for that later. She went to Cat’s closet, straight to the perfume shelf beside the jewellery cabinet and frowned. There were three perfumes displayed on little pedestals, but they were all ones that Cat had worn already, the bottles half empty from use. Kara sniffed each one, knowing they wouldn’t smell sweet or flowery. Knowing they weren’t how Cat smelled nowadays.

She tried not to think too hard about it. Cat maybe had a stash of perfume at work, because she always came home smelling sweet as candy and like jasmine in spring. The more Kara thought about the cloying smell, the more her nose burned. The more her heart burned. She called cat’s desk phone, the number that Cat had given her for when she worked late when they first got together, when Cat told her they had love. She didn’t answer.

Kara had the strongest senses on the planet. Strongest sense of sight and taste and touch and smell. Strongest hearing. She didn’t use them on Cat or Carter, though, and only on Alex and her friends when they were on the job. But Kara was fast to love and fast to worry and faster than light and sound. She listened carefully, listened for Carter’s heart first, hearing it beat, just a touch faster than usual, and for his voice which was high with joy and loud with youth.

But then she listened to Cat.

Her heart was fast. Faster than a hummingbird’s wings. For a moment, a guilty, horrible moment, Kara hoped she was in danger. Wished that her heart was beating in fear. She hated herself for it. Hated even more that it was not the case. Cat’s voice was high and keening, was warbled and desperate. Her voice was how Kara had not heard it in weeks because Cat was “so busy at work, darling”. She heard another voice, feminine and goading, smug. She heard someone telling Cat to come, ordering her to. Cat had never followed orders, but this time she did. Kara heard it, and wondered how she had not been fast enough.

She called Alex, who picked up on the second ring, with a stiff “Hey,” that meant she was working. Kara sobbed once and Alex told her to “get your ass over here, now”. Kara did. And she was fast. She was not fast enough. Alex was waiting for her, led her quickly to her office and asked and asked and asked what was wrong. Was it Eliza? Carter? Cat? Kara only cried, and tried to listen to her sister’s heart, calming enough to tell her pitiful story. Cat’s perfume had changed, Kara realised. So had Cat.

She had asked Alex what to do. Alex told her it was up to her, And Kara hated that answer more than anything. She knew she needed to leave, to grab her clothes and trinkets from Cat’s penthouse (_Cat’s_ penthouse) and move them back to her apartment. She needed to tell Cat that she was going. _Rao_, she needed to tell Carter. It was that thought, the one that she had to leave the boy who she loved with her whole heart in his house in the sky, while she lived on the third floor again.

Kara’s heart was fast to love, but it was faster, she found, to break.

Cat had not taken it well. She had defended herself, told Kara that she was just lonely, that she was overworked and stressed and she drank too much. All true, Kara knew. Cat said she was sorry, that she loved Kara, that she could change. True again. Cat said it would break Carter’s heart for them to split up, would be all over the tabloids, would cause them all strife for weeks in the media shitstorm. All completely true. She packed her things anyway. She did it faster than light, than sound, than a hummingbird’s wings. She was not fast enough.

“Why are you doing this,” Cat had asked, teary and tired and beautiful late that night, as Carter was across the city with his friends. “Please, Kara,” she begged. Kara cried too, for Carter and for Cat but mostly for herself. How much must she lose?

“You travelled the world to find me, Cat,” she said quietly, moving to the love of her life, cradling her face, wiping the tears with her thumbs. Cat gripped her tight enough to bruise. “You went to all the continents on earth to love me,” she whispered. Cat’s face was wobbling through her tears. “But I travelled from a dead planet and through the stars to find you. I travelled through the stars and into your heart,” she said brokenly. “And still, that was not enough.”

She let go of Cat, and flew away from the house in the sky and to the third floor. She unpacked her boxes and made her bed and lay there looking through her ceiling to the stars she had flown amongst to get to earth. She looked further than that, past all the quadrants her father had taught her about when she was little, past all the moons her mother had been able to name, the planets that her aunt had been to. And just _there_, she saw her home. She saw a red rock, cracked and desolate. She saw Krypton and Rao.

She had been so far across the universe, but somehow, as she wept in her bed on the third floor alone, she wondered if she wasn’t right back where she started.


End file.
